How we got here, where we are going and being a cog in something turning.

Editorial " …nanomedicine is one of the most important subjects at the very cutting edge of modern science and … Nanomedicine is the voice of this efflorescent discipline. " How we got here, where we are going and being a cog in something turning I am delighted that Nanomedicine will be going to eight issues in 2009, only 3 years after the journal's inauguration. This means that the scientific subdiscipline of nanomedicine is growing and that our namesake journal is proving to be the primary voice of this new field. How did we get here? Let me begin with a little of my personal journey. This will lead us to some key emergent scientific and technological themes, none mine, that have shaped nascent nano-medicine. These themes are expressed in the pages of Nanomedicine today, and expressed in ways that would have seemed like science fiction 10 years ago. When I moved to the University of Florida 10 years ago, I had this idea that the field of 'bio/ nano' was going to be important. This idea certainly did not originate with me. Earlier research and development efforts on particle-based drug-delivery systems piqued my interest in things bio/nano. And the research that led to the 2003 Nobel Prize to Agre and MacKinnon led me to a Eureka moment – biological ion channels can be viewed as nanomachines that use electromechan-ical motion to accomplish their critical biological functions. I was so excited about this revelation that my laboratory began research on the development of artificial nanotube-based ion channels. Finally, one of the first lectures I attended after moving to Florida was by future Nobel laureate Roger Tsien on combining mutants of green fluorescent protein with the Ca 2+-binding protein calmodulin to make sensors for real-time measurement of free Ca 2+ concentrations in living cells. Again, I saw a bio/nano machine, this time coupling the Ca 2+-induced change in the shape of calmodulin to a modulation of fluores-cence intensity. And, at heart, this machine was a sensor, a subject of great interest to me since my graduate school days. The journey has been fun for me, and the bio/nano field has since evolved into one of the cornerstones of modern nanotechnology. But a natural, twofold, consequence of that evolution has been: to increase the importance of applying developments in bio/nano technology to living systems – Tsien's work is a beautiful example; and to …